and World 4364 1995 1995 Academic Publishers Printed in the Ne - PDF document

and World 43-64, 1995. (~) 1995 Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. its nature and forms: an existential perspective JOHN G. MCGRAW of Philosophy, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H4B 1R6 interdisciplinary essay examines 1. With reference to its nature, loneliness can be defined, considered se, a non-constructive and, if sufficiently relentless and intense (the sort which is the central concern of this presentation), as a disagreeable and debilitat- ing way of feeling JOHN G. MCGRAW speaking, loneliness pertains primarily to desired but unattained personal or personified relationships for which one yearns; secondarily, to the absence of current relationships which one misses; and, tertiarily, to the loss of past relationships which one mourns or grieves. Furthermore, the lack or loss of such relationships refers principally to a defectiveness in their quality and, in a subsidiary manner, to a deficit in their quantity. As well, loneliness is a deficiency of the needs and metaneeds of intima- cy/meaning, specifically of that kind of intimacy which is meaningful and of that meaning which is intimate. Ordinarily, intimacy without sufficient personalized meaning delivers one to a more desperate loneliness than that which one had hoped to relieve or remove when one initiated or sustained the relationship. Correlatively, interpersonal relationships without intimacy are devoid of the kind of meaning humans most crave and that is intima- cy itself, pre-eminently the sort entailed in love, friendship and community. Consequently, loneliness exhibits itself as an emotional hunger for intima- cy/meaning, and extreme loneliness manifests itself as intimacy/meaning starvation. 2 Loneliness not only refers to the absence of the desired other's presence but this very absence is perceived as a presence, albeit a presence that is felt in the manner of an absence, that is, as a privation or deprivation of the other. Hence, it is not only the other's absence and the felt presence of its absence that constitute loneliness, it is also that this absence creates a lack or loss within the lonely self such that one feels porous and drained. Consequently, when the other is absent, the lonely person feels that something is wanting within one's self. One feels emptied (the lack of intimacy) and hollowed (the lack of meaning). The desired other, therefore, remains present in its absence as a kind of emotional regulative and constitutive ideal, all of which signals a deficit or defectiveness of being in the lonely. Because the absence of the other is felt to be a vulnerable and, frequently, a shameful self-defect, deeply lonely people do not so much yearn that others be a part of their lives but prefer even more desperately to be a part of the lives of o

thers, and often indiscriminately so. Loneliness also consists of a complexus of negative emotions as well as felt negations of one's being. With respect to the latter, loneliness makes its sufferer feel like a nullity bereft of intrinsic worth. This sentience of intrin- sic worthlessness as a human being must be distinguished from the sense of worthlessness one suffers specifically in social and cultural forms of lone- liness wherein one feels devoid of value due to external sources, be they ascribed respect or achieved esteem. In any case, the lonely individual feels like a nobody or, at least, like no one special. Further, loneliness is experi- enced as a want of what one implicitly expects and anticipates as rightfully ITS NATURE AND FORMS belonging to one as a human being: the realization of one's sociality. Lone- liness is, then, a felt nullification or invalidation of one's existence. From a physical perspective, the oppressive and gnawing pain and hurt that serious loneliness involves spare no part of one's body, although such symptoms may be especially felt in one's head, chest and stomach. This total embod- iment of loneliness explains the fatigue and lassitude that are its customary components. As for its negative emotions, loneliness entails not only those contained in the aforesaid feelings and attributions of self-worthlessness, but also sadness, shyness, shame, guilt, anxiety, frustration, anguish and desperation. In terms of motivation and behavior, loneliness can, on the one hand, benumb and paralyze one to a point of pure passivity; on the other hand, it can propel one into a state of panic. In addition, if loneliness is not dealt with, that is, if it is denied rather than lived and lived through, feelings of rage and rancor are liable to fester and to foment hostility, aggressiveness and violence. Without the warmth of meaningful intimacy and the light of intimate mean- ing, one's existence wanes and withers; inevitably one feels exiled in the glacial desert that comprises the wilderness of loneliness. Loneliness is the most radical instantiation of the lack or loss of human sociality. Being with others in various sorts of shared identity is the primordial mode of human existence. Persons are innately directed to the world and, more specifically, to the interpersonal world; if this were not the case, the very existence of lone- liness would be experientially and conceptually inexplicable. Unless one's existence is ordered to and for others, that is, unless one is positioned toward the world of others ("Mitwelt") with a stance marked by trust, openness and largesse of spirit, one's world invariably becomes depleted by the destitution which is loneliness. If being with others is the primary mode of being, then being alone is a secondary a

nd derived mode. Being alone in a positive manner can take the form of solitude, which is sea way of being separate from others in order to be by and with oneself, whereas loneliness is a mentally distressing and physically stressful way of feeling and being alone. Solitude implies a voluntary social and emotional disengagement from others and, usually, a physical distancing as well, although one can also distinguish, along with Nietzsche and Thomas Merton, an internal and subjective solitude which can be exercised while in the midst of others. Therefore, simple spatial distance from others is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for solitude, nor is it for loneliness since loneliness can patently be most agonizing when one is in the physical presence or proximity of others. Furthermore, solitude is not only desirable for rest, renewal, retreat, reflec- tion, creativity and personal growth, but it is a correlative of communal G. MCGRAW This said, being alone, whether understood positively or nega- tively, presupposes the original and primordial mode of being, that is, being with others in some positive manner. In order to achieve fulfilment and happiness, humans require both solitude and sociability (the latter being an acquired albeit natural function of consciousness whereas sociality is its giv- en structure) in sundry mixtures, depending upon such variables as culture, age, educational level, occupation, personal preference and temperament. Nonetheless, while it is an end in itself, solitude remains, in the final analysis, a subordinate although complementary mode of being. 2. The forms of loneliness Concerning its classification, the following forms of loneliness can be concep- tually and experientally distinguished: metaphysical, epistemological, com- municative, ontological (intrapersonal), ethical (moral), existential, emotional (eros), social (friendship), cultural and cosmic. 3 This division does not pur- port to be either exhaustive in number or exclusive in nature. It is often the case that a given form of loneliness, while distinct from all other forms, contributes to their generation and prolongation. In this fashion, the various forms of loneliness interact with one another in a manner similar to the way in which addictions (themselves frequent contributors to and consequences of loneliness) are reciprocally and dys-synergically connected. 2.1. loneliness most comprehensive form of loneliness, the one which serves as the ground and background of all the other forms, is metaphysical in nature. 4 Metaphysical loneliness is like a "master mood," an all-pervasive and free- floating apprehensiveness with respect to one's separateness in the world and one's place therein. It denotes a lack of intimate/meaningful solidari- ty with othe

r beings and bespeaks an entitative-emotional longing for their plenitude and connectedness. Further, it represents the experiential interweav- ing of the ultimate categories of reality, such as being and non-being, with their meta-psychic counterparts, namely, the feelings of completeness, full- ness and substantiality, in contrast to those of incompleteness, emptiness and tenuousness. With respect to extreme metaphysical loneliness, one's negative sense of aloneness or separateness may be caused by the feeling of being but an infinitesimal episode within infinite time and space. One feels stranded in the boundless expanse of a galaxy of disjointed and desertified beings. Thus, one may feel entitatively foundationless or adrift, as depicted in the celebrated ITS NATURE AND FORMS words of Coleridge: "Alone, alone, all, all alone/Alone on a wide, wide sea," with one's "soul in agony. ''5 The experience of metaphysical loneliness may pertain to both internal and external spatial separateness, as, for instance, Robert Frost relates: They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars - on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places. 6 In profound metaphysical loneliness, there is a sentience of the precarious- ness, fragility and contingency of one's separateness. Correlatively, objects may seem out of place or displaced and without conjunction and continuity. Indeed, the world of objects may appear as unreal or irreal. It is as if the world were falling apart; it feels ethereal and unpredictable. Thus, as their desired interpersonal world of subjects recedes from attainment or sustainment, the metaphysically lonely may experience a disintegration of the world of objects which parallels their own inner fragmentation. The experience of a lack or loss of subjects and objects contrasts with the feeling of being moored in a metaphysical synechism in which persons and things are capable of being intimately and meaningfully linked in stability and serenity. Such concepts as metaphysical harmony and disharmony, unity and diversity and other entitative couplets recall the notion of metaphysi- cal loneliness implicit, for example, in Empedocles' doctrine concerning the universal categories of strife and love. Should the forces of "neikos" (sym- bolic of eris, discord and conflict) surmount thos of "philotes" (emblematic of eros, concord and cooperation) one would have a salient illustration of metaphysical loneliness. In the clutches of such loneliness, one feels that the disjunction and dissonance of beings are more prominent and powerful than their congruity and euphony. The shattering of the medieval "Great Chain of Being," the discovery that the earth was not the center of the universe, and th

e movement from panpsychist and animist views of reality to denaturalized and devitalized atomistic and mechanistic positions represent but three developments which eventuated sudden or slow but, in any event, enormous metaphysical lone- liness. The felt lack or loss of intimacy/meaning at the level of (B)being in such instances could only have been catastrophic. Arguably, the overall heritage of Cartesianism, with its legacy of rationalism, logocentrism, scien- tism and mechanism, has had a propensity to depersonalize humans and to depersonify the earth and earthlings as a whole. Metaphysical loneliness is invariably the outcome of any vanquishing of being by becoming, with its resulting meta-psychic lack of security, stability and safety. Such a victory JOHN G. MCGRAW spells a singularly lonely and alienating reversal for those who cling to an experiential metaphysics of sameness and similarity and so stand aghast at the prospect of diversity and difference. The causes of metaphysical loneliness are ultimately rooted in the principles of individualization (whether these be conceived as physical, mental and/or spiritual in nature) that produce the separateness of beings, the factuality of which can initiate an agitated yearning for a more intimate congruence with others. For Erich Fromm, the awareness of one's self as a separate entity is the "source of all anxiety"; one would "become insane" due to the prison of his aloneness, he remarks, if one "could not unite himself in some form or other with other men and with the world outside. ''7 To counteract the division and divisiveness of being(s), one may yearn for a complete entitative integration with others, including the non-plus-ultra unity of metaphysical monism in which all beings are numerically one. This monism signifies a longing for the ultimate structural unity of beings beyond any functional union that might bridge and bond them. It reflects the need to avoid its antithesis, the feeling of being imprisoned in atomistic and monadic isolation wherein one feels sealed off from any intimacy/meaning with other beings. Metaphysical loneliness is not only the province of philosophical thought but, as the above citation from Frost suggests, it is also a compelling theme of literature. For example, metaphysical isolation is evidenced in one of T. S. Eliot's characters who grieves that he has "always been alone... / One is always alone./Everyone is alone or so it seems. ''8 In fact, the aggrieved aloneness which comprises loneliness is, for E. Bulwer-Lytton, the universal theme of poets: Alone! -that wom out word, So idly spoken, and so coldly heard; Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known, Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word ALONE! 9 2.2. Epistemological loneliness If the distance to the des

ired other cannot be traversed metaphysically and structurally by being or becoming the other, then perhaps it can be bridged epistemologically, to wit, through the functions of consciousness. To exem- plify epistemic loneliness, one can invoke the views of Ben Mijuskovic who maintains that all acts of consciousness and conduct are inevitably motivated by the wish to escape or evade loneliness. However, to do so, he reasons, is impossible because consciousness is so constituted that loneliness serves as its sovereign a priori, in other words, as its absolutely universal and neces- sary principle. Consequently, loneliness is the prism by which we perceive ITS NATURE AND FORMS and evaluate reality, although we are not, as a rule, aware of the prism itself. In Mijuskovic's estimation, no theory of consciousness can explain how we can satisfactorily reach or reach into others or be reached by them in order to rescue and reclaim consciousness from its "master motivator," loneliness itself. 10 Be they methodical or haphazard, all endeavors to liberate oneself from (epistemic) loneliness remain unsuccessful. Epistemological and metaphysical loneliness pervade the writings of Same, according to whom human beings are metaphysically (read "ontologically") contingent, gratuitous, superfluous and, above all, isolated entities. From an epistemological perspective, human consciousness is a hole in Being, a nothingness. However, like nature, consciousness abhors a vacuum and, given the voracious vortex that it is, consciousness is constrained to seek a plenitude of Being in order to fill up the lack, the deficiency, the non-being which it is. To circumvent this innate loneliness, one attempts to unite the emptiness and nothingness that comprise consciousness (Being-for-itself) with the fullness of Being, as objectively instantiated by the non-conscious Being-in-itself. But a unity of these ontological polarities of Being is impossible, as is the being which symbolizes their coalescence, God. Humans are nothing but a futile and frustrated yearning to be a divine-like repletion. Indeed, Sartre conceives God to be but the projection of human loneliness and the project of its redemption. Metaphysically and epistemologically considered, a human being is nothing else than loneliness because it is forever frustrated in its endeavors at self-completion via otherness. In passing, it is instructive to note that Sartre speaks of an "original solitude of the for-itself ''11 and had considered entitling Nausea, Essay: On the Loneliness of the Mind. 12 For Sartre, the most radical attempt of consciousness to transcend its isola- tion is love, whereby consciousness endeavors to annihilate its contingency and to satisfy its esurience for the abundance of Being. Sartre insists that the

lovers strive to preserve their "internal negation" (freedom) yet eliminate the "external negation," the abysmal metaphysical-epistemological fissure that divides them. However, two freedoms cannot achieve the perpetual unity which love seeks, and so the project of love as the merging of freedoms is doomed from the outset. Any overcoming of the lovers' metaphysical- epistemological isolation by love's "illusion of fusion" is impossible. Alas, love's inevitable failure hurls the lovers into a more desolating loneliness than the metaphysical and epistemic isolation they had hoped to escape prior to their project(ion)s of love. Since love was pursued as a pledge of the absolute and eternal unity of the intimates, its downfall unleashes its condemnation: "Hell is other people. ''13 At base, love is a form of self-deception and a willed deception of the beloved. Human intimacy as a whole is forever foiled, broken or betrayed; its JOHN G. MCGRAW only ratifies the Sartrean pronouncement that conflict is the original meaning o fall human relationships and exposes love for the seductive charade that it is. Individuals are perpetually denuding, reifying and stealing each other's objective being (Being-for-others) by means of "the look." The latter is a regard more like a condemning and if-looks-could-kill glare than a neutral, much less a loving, gaze; it is a stare that alienates the self from itself and its world. 14 Given this aggressive if not schizoid view of consciousness as its exists in the world, it is no wonder intimacy is merely a temporary truce between isolated and isolating combatants. In sum, the erotic-ontic principle called love, which is traditionally posited as the conqueror of metaphysical and epistemological loneliness since it allegedly joins beings in an essential oneness (as paradigmatically exemplified by Aristophanes' myth of the three original sexes), is precluded by the lovers' initial and irreversible individualization and entitative segregation. At most, Sartrean lovers secure not a permanent structural unity but merely a fleeting functional union. Love is an alliance that is utterly precarious, subject as it is to disillusion and dissolution and, above all, to the vicissitudes of freedom's preferences and projects, all of which explains the lovers' craving for oaths, vows and promises, projects undertaken to install being in the dreaded flux of becoming. Given the clash of freedoms and the proclivity of humans to thingify one another, Sartre's epistemology and metaphysics (ontology) yield an eros forever at the tender mercies of eris. The upshot of these inevitable frays is that humans remain "solitaire" rather than "solidaire." Epistemological loneliness is also allied to the position that one is too close to one's self to intimately

grasp the self and too far from others to know or be known by them, with the result that such knowledge is ephemeral and superficial. Moreover, it could be further claimed that even if cognition could penetrate the interior of the self and/or of others, and it is these recesses that intimacy seeks to obtain and intimate, it is, at best, only translucent rather than transparent knowledge. Therefore, cognition falls far short of the closeness and contact coveted for surmounting epistemic loneliness. Should it be conceded that there are transparent dimensions or elements of the conscious self cognitively attainable, it can still be maintained that most if not all of the uniqueness of the self is buried in the unconscious, in regions of the mind not accessible to or retrievable by any type of cognition. It can then be further asserted that intimacy seeks to access this distinctiveness and, short of this, loneliness looms. All these professed cognitive obstacles and objections regarding the acces- sibility to the conscious or unconscious mind play a pivotally practical role in the belief of the lonely that the self and, in particular, its singularity is foreclosed to would-be intimates. Consequently, in addition to wanting to be ITS NATURE AND FORMS 51 for their intrinsic worth as persons, humans wish to be known for being this or that special person, and when they feel they are not so adjudged, epistemic loneliness erupts. However, the lonely complain not only about the non-acknowledgement of their essential distinctiveness and of their not being understood and appreciated therein, but they also decry the fact that their very existence is unknown or ignored such that they are sequestered in anonymity and so bewail the feeling of being unattached to anyone or anyone in particular. In a similar vein, Husserl declares the transcendental Ego to be anonymous and belonging to no one in particular, 15 and, hence it is "unremittingly lonesome. ''16 Accordingly, the lonely have a penchant for believing that their presence is not noticed and that their absence is not missed (if the "percipi est esse" doctrine applies to anyone or anything in reality, it surely does to the lonely). Finally, this professed cognitive inaccessibility largely accounts for the com- mon conviction by the lonely that they are not only unknown (both as to their existence and also as to their personal and unique essence) but that they are also, like a Kantian thing-in-itself, unknowable. At this point, the desperation and despondency of extreme epistemic loneliness may accede to the despair of depression. It should be emphasized that any model of consciousness may beget epis- temic loneliness. Reflexive versions of consciousness may lead to the position that the self is caught by and insuperabl

y confined to the web of its own self- reflexions and is thereby irremediably cut off from other dimensions of the self as well as from others. Since loneliness is equally if not more a case of being lonely in the midst of others rather than in their absence, phenomeno- logical models of consciousness do not escape the problem of the self being deprived of the intimate presence of alterity. The very fact that conscious- ness is necessarily directed to others, as the intentional model of conscious- ness claims, yet is incapable of achieving satisfactory intimacy with them, can make such loneliness all the more insufferable. Behaviorist-materialist notions of consciousness, insofar as they can account for the nature and pro- cess of consciousness at all, arguably guarantee the radical isolation of human consciousness, one from another, confined as they are to the impenetrability o f matter. 2.3. loneliness that one can overcome the obstacles of metaphysical and epis- temic loneliness, still one may not be able to relate satisfactorily to those sought for intimacy/meaning. This inability constitutes communicative lone- liness, which has a variety of types, not the least of which are the following. First, it can refer to the loneliness that arises because one cannot effectively G. MCGRAW with others in general due, for instance, to a lack of social skills, communicative competence or social intelligence. Secondly, it con- cerns the loneliness that emerges from the incapacity to relate to specifically desired intimates. Thirdly, communicative loneliness encompasses the lone- liness which transpires as the result of the ineptitude or unwillingness to express the negative and self-negating feelings of isolation that emanate from any other form of loneliness. While it is likely that no inner state is fully commensurable with any vehicle of exteriorization, this is especially true of communicating one's experience of loneliness. It is precisely the nature of all forms of loneliness, particularly when intense and inveterate, to encumber communication. Each form of loneliness contains both general and specific barriers to the communicating of its nature, causes, contents or some other aspect of its composition. The impediments to such communication may be legion but they usually include the pain and humiliation involved in disclosing one's loneliness, particularly in cultures where the lonely are stigmatized as being weaklings, loners and losers. Like any abject suffering, loneliness is prone to enfeeble rather than enhance and empower one's communicative capacities. Since loneliness is such a formidably invasive suffering, so much so that Marcel insists that loneliness is the only suffering, it may propel one into a state of utter muteness. In the suffering of lo

neliness and vice-versa, one feels not only all alone but one readily believes oneself to be the only one alone or, at least, so miserably alone. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann has described such desolating loneliness as follows: This loneliness.., is of such a nature that it is incommunicable by one who suffers it. Unlike other noncommunicable emotional experiences, it cannot be shared empathetically.... People who are in the grip of severe.., loneliness cannot talk about it, and people who have.., had such an experience can seldom do so either, for it is so frightening and uncanny in character that they try to dissociate the memory of what it was like, and even the fear of it. This frightened secretiveness and lack of communication about loneliness seem to increase its threat for the lonely ones, even in retrospect; it produces the sad convictions that nobody else has experienced or ever will sense what they are experiencing or have experienced. Even mild borderline states of loneliness do not seem to be easy to talk about. ~7 Of course, one could maintain that the very verbalization of the conviction that loneliness of whatever sort is incommunicable may cause a sympathetic response (itselfa form of intimacy) in another, and to that degree communica- ITS NATURE AND FORMS tive loneliness may be lessened. One can then be said to "pool" this ineffable loneliness with that of another. But the question remains as to whether the alleged sharing of loneliness itself may, in fact, double rather than diminish it. Because severe loneliness resists verbal and direct communication, Robert Hobson recommends that one should speak to the core of loneliness by "a bodily poetry which is carried alive into the heart with passion. ''18 Still, it may be the case that the self remains incommunicable (and the lonely self all the more so) by any art or artistry, as Proust concedes: I might caress her.., but, just as if I had been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt I was touching no more than a sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reaches to infinity. 19 2.4. (intrapersonal) loneliness essence, ontological loneliness is the felt threat to obtaining or maintain- ing self-identity and self-integrity, a menace that occurs due to a deficiency of intimacy/meaning which the self seeks within itself. Of course, this indi- gence is ultimately caused by the absence of the desired other. No meaning that concerns intimacy is other than social in its fibre, since intimacy by its very nature pertains to values created or discovered and shared with others. Because humans are social beings their sense of identity is depen- dent on others, and this is true of all individuals, including those deemed mature, since authenticity is compose

d of positive ways of being both depen- dent ("homonomous," to use the term of Andras Angyal) and independent (autonomous). Regarding these matters, Jaspers' remark is apropos: "I cannot be myself unless another is himself with me. ''2° Authenticity is necessarily a process of selves-actualization and the securing of intimacy/meaning is a if not the crucial component of that function. One is always at the precipice of ontological loneliness for, as Jaspers cautions, "Even amidst the abundance of existence, loneliness may suddenly yawn before me as the possible abyss of nonbeing. ''21 The other may slowly or suddenly cease being available for me and vice-versa, with the effect that one is not available to oneself and, thus, the self is severed within its self- world ("Eigenwelt"). One feels (and all loneliness is quintessentially both a mental feeling or emotion of suffering and a physical feeling of pain) lost, without an interior compass, as e.e. cummings says, in the "enormous room of the self." The anxiety embedded in loneliness can cause one to feel like a nomadic monad exiled in what Loren Eiseley calls "the ghost continent of the self." Similarly, Nietzsche alludes to the dangers (and opportunities) of being lost in the lonely labyrinth of the self. Once again, without others one G. MCGRAW lost within oneself and at a loss as to how to gain or regain one's identity or higher levels of integrity and integration. Ontological loneliness is, therefore, a feeling of fragmentation of self-being (hence, this form of loneliness is called ontological and intrapersonal). On the other hand, such loneliness can befall the self because of dissatisfaction with its relationship to part of its self, one that is analogous to the lonely disenchantment the self may have with its current interpersonal relationships. This disaffection with not being at home with one's self has appeared in many guises and disguises throughout history. It is recurrently depicted as the self's dismay at being trapped or entrapped by a part of itself, ordinarily by the avowed inferior segment such that the mind, ego, spirit, soul or consciousness is held to be shackled by the body or whatever else is deemed the non-spiritual or non-conscious element of the self. Thus, Plato regards the soul as being imprisoned by the body in the way an oyster is encased by its shell. Descartes considers the conscious ego to be immured by the body as by a bag of skin and a shroud. However, Alfred de Musset describes the body as being both the perpetrator and victim of the self's lonely incarceration: "If I could only get out of my skin for an hour or two. What solitudes all of these human bodies are. ''22 Less frequently, the soul has been assailed as the culprit in jailing the self. Thus, Andrew Marvel sorr

ows: "O who shall deliver me whole/From the bonds of this tyrannic Soul? ''23 Finally, William Blake bemoans the mind being its own jailer: "In every voice, in every ban/The mind-forg'd manacles I bear. ''24 Severe ontological loneliness may be pathological. It may enervate the body, fragment the mind, ravage the spirit and, in general, depersonalize the self. R. D. Laing chronicles the transition from normal loneliness to the pathological and depressed as one that proceeds from a provisional loneli- ness with its absence of relationships to a permanent despair and perpetual isolation wherein every relationship' is perceived as absence. 25 In this con- nection, loneliness has been deemed a major contributor to and consequence of psychosis and neurosis. 26 Indeed, psychoanalysts, such as Harry Gun- trip, consider loneliness to be the core of all serious mental disorders. 27 Not surprisingly, it is extremely prevalent among schizophrenics. 28 Studies show that lonely people, in general, have parents who are perceived as remote and untrustworthy, whereas non-lonely people have, in compari- son, parents who are warm, close, and helpful. As well, chronically lonely people come from families which furnish less "emotional nurturance, guid- ance or support" and which produce a climate that is "cold, violent, undis- ciplined and irrational. ''29 All this may be especially applicable to certain schizophrenogenic families, the members of which fail to provide one anoth- er with adequate affirmation, confirmation, availability and other foundational ITS NATURE 55 elements of intimacy, an improvidence which leaves them especially vulner- able to affective and affiliative deficiencies and, therefore, to loneliness. 3° 2.5. Ethical (moral) loneliness According to de Balzac, of all the varieties of loneliness, ethical loneliness is the most terrifying. As understood here, ethical loneliness includes the loneliness inherent in freedom, choice and responsibility as well as in value formation, enactment and commitment. It entails the formidable moral task of facing one's loneliness in its diverse forms and of converting it into eth- ically constructive attitudes and actions. By means of the thought of Sartre and Nietzsche, some of the elementary features of moral loneliness will be sketched. Sartre asserts that the price of freedom is loneliness. He declares in The Flies that the "gift" of freedom "is a sad one, of loneliness and shame. ''31 Orestes, the hero of this grim play, forfeits his love and only joy of life, his sister Electra, because he must choose either freedom and loneliness, on the one hand, or slavery and her love, on the other. Orestes chooses freedom and then shudders at the realization that he is condemned to be "alone, alone .... Alone until I die and a

fter that - ?,,32 In discovering that freedom and loneliness are inextricably linked during the entirety of life, Orestes also learns that each person is abandoned in the universe without moral guides or guidelines: Suddenly, out of the blue, freedom crashed down upon me .... I knew myself to be alone, utterly alone . . . I was like a man who lost his shadow symbolic of ontological loneliness. And there was nothing in heaven, no right or wrong, or anyone to give me orders a conviction that occurs in cosmic loneliness as well. In the Sartrean account of freedom, one must be responsible for one's loneliness and the role the latter assumes in one's moral existence. Moreover, not only is the person responsible for her choices (what might be called the functional freedom of consciousness) but she is constituted as a person precisely by the series and sum of such lonely actions. Although one is not responsible for being responsible, since she is condemned to freedom (the kind of freedom which is the structure of consciousness) and, therefore, to loneliness, She alone is responsible for creating her essence, which is to say that "existence precedes essence." The loneliness that lies within all choices does not stop with herself, however. On the contrary, her anguished responsibility includes everyone else in the sense that she is obligated to fashion herself, as lucidly and courageously as possible, to be a model for G. MCGRAW others. 33 Such, for Sartre, is the awesome loneliness of freedom and responsibility that burdens everyone and always. Whereas Sartre situates ethics and loneliness in an essentially egalitarian context, Nietzsche enlists an elitist morality entrenched in the self's over- coming its loneliness and transforming it into a creative solitude. His natural aristocrat is a lonely-at-the-top solitary who scales moral mountains not only to individuate himself into a fully human being, but to separate himself from the pathetic moral misfits and mediocrities below who herd together to ward off the dangers and demands of loneliness and solitude. The lonely masters must flee to their solitudes to avoid the multitudes with their pusillanimous and venomous "ressentiment." In so doing, the former must steel themselves, Nietzsche warns, against the inevitable horror of being perpetually lonely and solitary, which results from, among other things, being alone with "the judge and avenger of one's own law," that is, one's conscience. 34 Nietzsche's alter ego, Zarathustra, himself "the loneliest of the lonely," exhorts the "free spirits" and risk takers to sojourn alone in both loneliness and solitude. 35 These spirits must live dangerously as to styles of character and virtue that go beyond the conventional and conformist categories of good and evil, the lat

ter being representative of a slavish and flock mentality and morality. For those who would gain Olympian superiority, loneliness and sOlitude are the criteria and catalysts mandatory for self-mastery with its dictates of self-obeying and self-commanding. Nietzsche proclaims that he alone is great who is able "to go it alone."36 Moreover, since philosophy itself is a summons to solitariness, that philosopher shall be "the greatest who can be the loneliest and the most concealed .... ,,37 It is within one's lonely solitude that the most formidable foe must be confronted: one's self alone. In the lonely realization of the will to power (which can be construed in the context of self-overcoming as the ceaseless creation of an authentic self) the individual must face all by oneself "the troglodytic minotaurs" which inhabit the subterranean realms of the self. 38 "Lonely one," Zarathustra cautions, "you are going the way to yourself," but in crossing over to the self one must go through one's "seven demons ''39 and traverse the seven levels of solitariness, 4° if one would become fully human and foreshadow the over(super)man. Nietzsche counsels those who embark on this inner odyssey that one can be both his worst and best in solitariness. 41 If the rewards of enduring loneliness and solitude are inestimable, so also, he avows, are their copious and variegated perils. 2.6. loneliness live is to be alone. The last result of creation is a shudder at one's loneli- ness" (C. F. Hebbel). This attestation refers to what is here called existential ITS NATURE AND FORMS loneliness, which is the recognition of the ineradicable loneliness that per- dures throughout the spheres and stages of human existence. In this respect, Joseph Conrad's lament that humans are "lonely from cradle to grave and perhaps beyond" underscores the human predicament as one of existential loneliness. This form of loneliness is found in the inevitable ruptures of inti- macy/meaning within the separate self as it journeys by way of its individu- ation and socialization through its checkered history of involution/evolution and disintegration/integration. Existential loneliness may, in fact, comprise the centrality as well as the cutting edge of such processes. Furthermore, the ordinary lifespan is composed of the biological ages and psycho-ethical gradations, which are themselves subject to unavoidable defi- ciencies of intimacy/meaning. For example, the transitions from infancy to childhood, to adolescence and thence to adulthood, seniorhood, elderhood, senescence, dying and death, all with their sundry rites of passage, neces- sarily involve periods of existential loneliness. Moreover, such factors as lifestyle, occupation, disease and disability, not to mention human and natu- ral calamities, a

ll have a cumulative effect on the kind, depth, intensity and extensiveness of existential loneliness. Existence is demarcated by what Jaspers calls "limit" or "boundary" situa- tions, which include finitude, chance, death and loneliness itself. 42 Although ultimately impenetrable to rational comprehension, these experiences are potential turning points in one's life and are mandatory for the development of authenticity. A legitimate case can be made for the contention that lone- liness as a whole, and especially existential loneliness, is not only a limit situation but is a crucial ingredient of all other boundary situations. What is more, one must distinguish the experience of loneliness native to the other forms of loneliness from the loneliness of one's self-defining experiences. It is the latter which is existential loneliness and which constitutes the inner lining of all the other boundary situations. Death is arguably the paradigm of not only existential loneliness but of all forms of loneliness since loneliness itself is terrifying, as Rollo May essays, precisely because it is the specter of death. 43 Then too, it may also be the case that death (and dying) are dreaded precisely because they may presage a state of interminable loneliness. We may be beings-towards-death, ~t la Heidegger, but because death by definition is outside of experience (it is the end of experience and not the experience of the end) it is, therefore, beyond one's comprehension and, even more, one's control. Hence, the nature of this sort of existential loneliness cannot be grasped as one does other facets and forms of loneliness that occur within life. Thus, the feeling of powerlessness with respect to death may not only increase the impact of the other types of existential loneliness but the force of the other forms of loneliness as well. The JOI-~ c. MCG~W very fact that humans are called mortals reveals the undercurrent of loneliness associated with human existence as a whole. Matthew Arnold tersely captures how existence is structured by loneliness (including implicit references to metaphysical and communicative loneliness) and how our mortality shapes and seals life: Yes, in the sea of life enisled With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortals live 44 (eros) and social (friendship) loneliness a deficit or defectiveness of intimacy/meaning defines all ten categories of loneliness, it is most often associated with emotional and social loneliness, best considered together. Briefly stated, emotional loneliness is an inadequacy with respect to erotic, romantic, sexual or genital intimacy/meaning. Social loneliness consists in a want of desired intimacy/meaning with respect to friendship, friendliness, companionship and community as

well as to social networks, social support systems and shared experience as a whole. All forms of loneliness imply a felt lack or loss of sociality; social loneliness also refers to a lack of the aforesaid sociability. In short, emotional loneliness can be said to be a deficiency of shared intimacy whereas social loneliness is primarily a deficiency of intimate sharing. 45 This said, some clarificatory remarks regarding the nature of intimacy and meaning are particularly apropos here. Intimacy is the most subjective side of meaning whereas meaning is the objective constituent of intimacy. Intimacy, itself both the platform and pinnacle of meaning (especially insofar as inti- macy refers to genuine love), resides within the inmost and ownmost realm of values. Intimacy is inmost because it stems from and seeks what is most interior; it is ownmost because it concerns the cornerstone of one's freedom, including the power over the self-disclosure of those meanings deemed most private. Intimacy is, therefore, the most personal aspect of subjectivity in its spiritual, mental and physical dimensions. However, genuine intimacy is not subjectivistic for, while it transforms the interior world of its subjects, it transports them to the objective world, enriching this latter world with its personalized values. Hence, authentic intimacy liberates one from subjectivistic egoism and selfishness. In this sense, intimacy is objective and its lack disrupts and dis- torts one's view of objective reality. But while intimacy can be cognitively objective, it simultaneously transcends and comprehends the objective world, ITS NATURE AND FORMS vivifying and unifying its values and meanings. In fact, one can rightly pred- icate objectivity of intimacy both in the sense that the latter can perceive its objects from a privileged and illuminating perspective as well as in the sense that intimacy, and more especially love, has objective and rational compo- nents, including its own kind of universal yet particularized language and logic, all of which Augustine, Pascal and Scheler have forcefully reasoned. Accordingly, one can speak ofintimacy's "transobjectivity" precisely because it liberates what is intersubjective and delivers the intimates from subjec- tivistic egoism. Additionally, genuine intimacy (pseudo-intimacy invariably increases the very loneliness one struggles to evade or vanquish) personal- izes objects and, more generally, the entirety of nature, even as non-personal objects and meanings help to naturalize persons. In sum, intimacy both light- ens and enlightens one's world; without it life becomes insupportable to the extent that the meaning of one's life is jeopardized. 2.8. loneliness and groups that feel they do not belong because they are exclud- ed, left out, ov

erlooked, unconnected to or disconnected from the mainstream of society and from its various powers (which themselves in no small man- ner affect the societal standards of intimacy/meaning) suffer cultural lone- liness. To appraise the degree and level of such loneliness, one can use the following continuum of inclusion/exclusion devised by Mark Leary. Maxi- mum inclusion occurs when others seek out the individual for relationships. Active inclusion means that one is welcomed but not sought out; passive inclusion indicates that others merely accept and allow one's participation. Ambivalence occurs when others are indifferent to whether one is included or excluded. In passive exclusion one is simply ignored; with active exclusion one is deliberately avoided. Maximal exclusion ensues when one is rejected, forsaken, banished or abandoned. 46 This form of loneliness, therefore, involves a lack of cultural cohesion and identity. To compensate for this dearth of belongingness and cohesive- ness, some individuals are driven towards pseudo-types of independence and dependence. Thus, negatively autonomous "outsiders" may develop exces- sive dependence upon members of a socio-cultural out-group, which itself may be a negative union. For example, members of a gang exhibit non- conformist individuality from the perspective of mainstream society but are themselves conformist with respect to the gang itself. Of course, the dominant socio-cultural ideologies and practices may themselves beget a "culture of loneliness," as happens, for instance, in societies where an exceedingly indi- vidualistic and success-oriented outlook isolates people from one another by JOHN G. MCGRAW means of mindless competitiveness, consumerism and greed. In these cases, socio-cultural conditions institutionalize loneliness. Cultural loneliness is frequently found among such categories as minorities and immigrants as well as among age and gender groups. The underprivileged, marginals, outcasts, pariahs, rejects and all others who do not fully fit in are thereby relegated to the socio-cultural fringe where they are prime candidates for cultural loneliness. This loneliness has much in common with social and cosmic loneliness, not to mention such phenomena as homesickness, lone- someness, nostalgia and, especially, alienation. An analysis of these cousins and cognates of loneliness, and, in particular, their relationships to cultural loneliness, exceeds the scope of this essay, save to say that they pertain, more strictly speaking, to separation, to the past and to a longing for beings whose identities are known. Contrastingly, every form of loneliness primarily concerns one's separateness, the future and a yearning for persons or person- ifications whose identities may be known or unknown, to cit

e only a few of the many differences that obtain among these phenomena. 2.9. loneliness cosmic loneliness there is the feeling that not only are beings chaotically dispersed and discordant (a perception also prevalent in metaphysical loneli- ness), but as well that there is no person or personal power, force or other such entity to which human beings are themselves related or, at least, intimately so. Consequently, one has the impression of being alone in an impersonal universe devoid of any foundational and ultimate solicitude and providential intimacy/meaning. Subsequently, the world appears unfriendly, hostile and, perhaps worst of all, devastatingly oblivious or impervious to human needs, especially those of affiliation, affection and affectivity in general. The sense of being in a non-personal universe, one indifferent or inimical to human needs, causes one to feel that life is absurdly fortuitous. With Leibniz, one may wonder why there is something rather than nothing and, with Bertrand Russell, one may reckon that if this is the best possible world (h la Leibniz), then one shudders to think what the worst possible would be like. Perhaps the universe, as Sartre contends, is simply a brute (meaningless) and brutal (intimacyless) fact with no given goal as to its parts or its alleged whole. The awareness of this gratuitous and gruesome given surrenders one to an overwhelming loneliness, a loneliness that is distinct from but promotes the feelings of absurdity, forlornness and abandonment that result from a universe so conceived. Almost invariably God is reckoned the putative panacea of cosmic and, in fact, of all forms of loneliness. With respect to cosmic loneliness alone, God is traditionally understood as the universal and ultimate ground and goal ITS NATURE AND FORMS 6 1 of all intimacy/meaning. Indeed, what is the essence of heaven and hell but, respectively, the total and unending maximal inclusion of or the maximal exclusion from an intimacy/meaning shared with "the Person of persons"? Without God the universe is conceived as a depersonalized, chaotic vacuum which intimacy/meaning-seeking beings find unequivocally repugnant. To be delivered from cosmic loneliness, the all-embracing void must be rendered a personified and personalized totality of intimacy/meaning. In this vein, Edna St. Vincent Millay writes that it is "utter terror and loneliness" which incite one "to address the Void as a Thou. ''47 God is, in the words of Denis de Rougemont, the original and ultimate form of the Thou. Ferdinand Ebner defines God as the Absolute Thou and absolute loneliness as the Thoulessness of the I. What is essayed here as cosmic loneliness is peerlessly portrayed by Coleridge's words: Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a sa

int took pity on My soul in agony. •.. So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seem6d there to be. 4s To conclude, it can be said that the various forms of loneliness, each in its own fashion, touch the heart of what it means to be a person and to be a person precisely as a network of its relationships, especially those of an interpersonal nature. In these regards, it deserves reaffirming that a person is by its very nature social and that loneliness is the most dramatic yet mundane manifestation of its lack of sociality. As Norman Cousins has declaimed, human history is one thing and one thing only: the endeavor of humanity to shatter its loneliness. This affliction is a prime example of a phenomenon whose sheer longevity and pervasiveness have camouflaged its theoretical and practical significance. However, it is exactly the evidentiality of a phenomenon that Kant, for instance, invites the philosopher to explore and even explicate. In the case of loneliness, however pedestrian an experience it might appear to be, its understanding, in his words, can inspire "noble awe," pertaining, as it does, to a kind of terrifying sublimity. 49 To use his language and that of Marcel, loneliness incorporates but surpasses the phenomenal and problematic (the mundane) and, in so doing, approaches the realm of the noumenal and mysterious (the arcane), the domain of the person in its quintessential intersubjectivity. G. MCGRAW D. Bowskill, the Lonely People Bobbs Merrill, 1974), p. 2. 2. In this vein, Erich Fromm remarks that to "feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death." from Freedom York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1941), p. 34. 3. The names of the last four forms of loneliness are taken from two pioneers in the for- mulation of its taxonomy: R. Weiss, The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1973) and W. Sadler, "On the Verge of Loneliness," (1974): 255--276. I am especial- ly indebted to Sadler for his insights regarding cultural loneliness and for his typology of loneliness as a whole. For a classification of loneliness in terms of religious and theological considerations, see J. McGraw, "God and the Problem of Loneliness," Studies (1992): 319--346. 4. With few if any exceptions, only emotional (eros), social (friendship) and cultural lone- liness as well as certain religious kinds of cosmic loneliness have, to my knowledge, received any sort of statistical analysis, save for one experiment conducted by clinical psychologist, Nancy Humber. In 1990 she used the taxonomy presented here and found that all ten forms of loneliness were experienced by her subjects and that the two most frequently reported were, first, social and, then, metaph

ysical (source: personal commu- nication from Dr. Humber). 5. S. T. Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I, ed. E. Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 196. 6. R. Frost, "Desert Places," in Poems of Robert Frost York: Henry Holt, 1949), p. 386. 7. E. Fromm, The of Loving York: Bantam Books, 1956), pp. 6-7. 8. T. S. Eliot, The Party Faber and Faber, 1950), p. 117. 9. E. Bulwer-Lytton, "The New Timon," in W. Dusenbury, The of Loneliness in Modern American Drama The University of Florida Press, 1960), p. 8. 10. B. Mijuskovic, in Philosophy, Psychology and Literature Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1979), pp. 1-38. 11. J.-P. Sartre, and Nothingness, H. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 456. The French word "solitude" in this context suggests loneliness and isolation rather than the positive state of being alone designated above as solitude. 12. A. Cohen-Solal, A Life, A. Cancogni and ed. N. MacAffee (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 116. 13. In Sartre's portrayal of hell, there are other rooms to which any of the condemned could flee in order to gain refuge from the torture inflicted upon them by the others. But each prefers to remain tormentingly together, all of which suggests that being absolutely alone is a worse hell than being with hateful others. Indeed, endless and total aloneness would surely be the most fiendish and infernal existence conceivable. Exit, Exit and Three Other Plays, S. Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1955), especially pp. 3 and 47. 14. Consequently, Sartre's ontological category of Being-for-others is not to be construed as if one's relatedness to others was inherently benevolent. O n the contrary, one's Being- for-others is that aspect of one's being which exists for others as an object and over which they try to exert their cognition and control. Of course, one of the effects of defining consciousness as a nothingness and emptiness is to render it implacably acquisitive. In early Sartre, consciousness appears incapable of benevolent intimacy; therefore, the wish to be loved is the primary project of all love. Naturally, consciousness so construed is doomed to loneliness. Indeed, as empirical data details, people who are habitually acquisitive in their relationships have as their social legacy an abiding loneliness. For Sartre's notion of love and allied phenomena, see and Nothingness, 361--412. ITS NATURE AND FORMS E. Husserl, in E Heinemann, and the Modern Predicament York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 53. Heinemann maintains that, in bracketing the world and then positing a transcendental Ego, Husserl experiences first a human and then a transcendental loneliness. In fact, Heinemann declares that "the central point.., of Husserl's ph

ilosophy is the philosophy of the lonely transcendental self." Indeed, in concert with sentiments previously expressed by many other philosophers, including Hegel and Nietzsche, I-Iusserl contends that "One becomes a philosopher through loneliness .... Philosophy arises in the lonely responsible thought of the man who is philosophizing" (pp. 51-52). 16. E. Husserl, in Mijuskovic, p. 79. 17. E Fromm-Reichmann, "Loneliness," in J. Hartog et al., eds. Anatomy of Loneliness York: International Universities Press, 1980), pp. 345--346. 18. R. Hobson, "Loneliness," of Analytic Psychology (1974): 72. 19. M. Proust, of Things Past, 3, trans. C. Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 393. 20. K. Jaspers, II, trans. E. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 71. Jaspers, p. 72. 22. A. de Musset, R. Sayre, in Society MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 117. 23. A. Marvell, in W. Gerber, University Press of America, 1986), p. 38. 24. W. Blake, in Gerber, p. 38. 25. R. D. Laing, The of Experience York: Ballantine Books, 1967), p. 37. 26. See, for example, D. Perlman and L. Peplau, "The Causes of Loneliness," in L. Peplau and S. Goldston, eds. the Harmful Consequences of Severe and Persistent Loneliness MD: The United States National Institute of Mental Health, 1984), pp. 13-46. 27. H. Guntrip "Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell," Psychoanalysis (1973): 275. 28. L. Gerstein et al., "The Experience of Loneliness Among Schizophrenic and Normal Per- sons," of Social Behavior and Personality (1987), 246. What precise role loneliness plays in mental disorders is often problematic and this may be especially so regarding schizophrenia. It is clear, however, that a disorder that so severely isolates one from others and from oneself will entail grievous loneliness. The relationship of lone- liness to schizophrenia will depend on such considerations as the approach or model of loneliness employed, of which the following can be listed: the existential, biomedi- cal, psychodynamic, behaviorist, cognitive, phenomenological, general systems theory, humanistic, psycho-spiritual, sociological, privacy and interactionist (cf. Peplau and Perl- man, pp. 123-134). As to schizophrenia, its linkage to loneliness will similarly depend on the approach invoked. For instance, the schizophrenic model could be one or more of the following: the existential, psychodynamic, biomedical, environmental (behavioral and cognitive) and phenomenological. Evidence continues to mount that there is a biochemical basis for schizophrenia but even if it were conclusively proven that biochemical factors were its sole cause, these other approaches are necessary for its understanding and therapy. 29. Reported in Perlman and Peplau, p. 24. 30. See, for example, Fromm-Reichmann, pp. 2

84--295. 31. J.-P. Sartre, The Exit and Three Other Plays, S. Gilbert (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1955), p. 123. 32. Ibid., pp. 124-125. 33. J.-P. Sartre, and Humanism, E Mairet (New York: Haskell House, 1977), pp. 26-30. 34. E Nietzsche, Spoke Zarathustra, The Nietzsche, and ed. W. Kauf- mann (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), p. 175. 35. Ibid., pp. 190; 163-166; 174-177. JOHN G. MCGRAW Nietzsche, WilltoPower, W. Kaufmann andR. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1968), p. 358, no. 196. 37. Nietzsche, Good and Evil, W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1989), p. 139, no. 212. For a consideration of Nietzsche's own personal and philosophical solitariness and concealment, see J. McGraw, "Nietzsche: The Silence of a Solitary," Review (1993): 1-28. 38. Nietzsche, Good and Evil, M. Cowan (South Bend, Indiana: Gateway Editions, 1955), p. 35, no. 29. 39. Nietzsche, Spoke Zarathustra, 176. 40. Nietzsche, Homo, and ed. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1989), p. 303, no. 5. In this work, Nietzsche not only proclaims that he is a destiny but a destiny of solitariness. Even more, he claims not only that he has become solitariness, but that in and through him solitariness has become man: "Ich bin die Mensch" (p. 343, Appendix, d). 41. Nietzsche, Meditations, R. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1983), p. 139. 42. Jaspers, pp. 177-222. 43. R. May, Search for Himself (New W. W. Norton, 1953), p. 31. 44. M. Arnold, "To Marguerite," in I. Dilman, and Human Separateness York: Blackwell, 1987), p. 117. 45. Apropos of emotional loneliness, a character in John O'Hara's The "Why must we make such a thing of existential loneliness when it is the final condition of all of us? And where would love be without it?" As to social loneliness, it is estimated that as many as 25% of adult US males do not have a truly close friend and confidant, a fact which bodes badly for the physical, mental and behavioral health of a society. Not surprisingly, Ignazio Silone has concluded that "the real revolution of our era is the disappearance of friendship." 46. M. Leary, "Responses to Social Exclusion: Social Anxiety, Jealousy, Loneliness, Depres- sion and Low Self-Esteem," of Social and Clinical Psychology (1990): 221- 229. 47. E. St. Vincent Millay, "Conversation at Midnight," in May, p. 202. 48. Coleridge, pp. 196 and 208. This citation clearly and poignantly reveals a fundamental distinction between metaphysical and cosmic loneliness. Lines one and two, as previously stated, characterize metaphysical loneliness while lines three to six, particularly lines five and six, describe cosmic. 49. I. Kant, on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, J. Goldthwait (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965